Over a hundred years after Thomas Crapper plied his trade as a plumber his name and especially the first four letters of it are still in daily use. But I would be surprised if in twenty years time santorum is still used in the sense Dan Savage intended, and I hope that at some point in the future Wikipedia will come to the view that notability can sometimes be transient. Of course there is the possibility that this neologism has more staying power than I thought, but in any event Mr Santorum is better off with articles like http://www.rollcall.com/issues/56_84/-203455-1.html and a neutrally written Wikipedia article explaining that his name was used for this neologism as an attack on him rather than just leaving it to sites that explain the word without the context of why it was coined.
As for the Google rank, I don't know how search engines will work in years to come, but I would be surprised if they didn't consider such things as when a webpage was last updated.
WSC
On 3 June 2011 16:28, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Fri, 3 Jun 2011, WereSpielChequers wrote:
8 letters, three syllables doth not a four letter word make, and the term itself is somewhat more obscure. I suspect that unless further flames are added to the fire, such as it provoking a sea change in Wikipedia policy, it will fade into obscurity.
How's it going to fall itno obscurity? 20 years from now a search for his name will still bring up our article about shit. Unless we do something to avoid an overinflated Google rank for the article, it can never fade away, ever, because of us.
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